The ideation stage of your game dev journey is arguably the most important part. It’s the starting point of months of development time, where you invest all of your money and resources. And if your idea isn’t going to bite? Well, all of the effort goes down the drain. Which, for some studios, is something they just can’t afford.
That’s why we’ve created the Concept Store. It’s a place where you can browse different proven concepts to work on. But the best thing about them is either every creative has been tested through our marketability testing, scored by our machine learning, or actually created by one of our experts. They’re all solid concepts which you can use and iterate on.
How long does the ideation process take?
It depends. How many resources do you have? What research tools do you have access to? And how many tests can you run, as quickly as possible?
Typically, the ideation process can take up to six months. This includes researching competitors and trends, initial brainstorming, visualising creatives, figuring out its main unique selling point, and testing them – before you even found a marketable game idea.
It’s a problem for any studio or developer team, especially if you lack the team. It eats into valuable development time, resources, and money.
Challenges when coming up with ideas
A lot of ideas come from trends, and they move quickly
As the name suggests, trends are fleeting. So if you’re not fast to scoop it up, develop, test, and get it out, then another studio may beat you to the punch. And take that top-charting spot.
Unless you’re staring at the top charts and social media for the next trend, and have a team under your belt to dissect each trend and smash out creatives to test on the fly, being ahead of the curve and your competition can be near impossible.
A bad idea can cost your months
It takes a while to see if any idea is plausible. You’ll need to research, design creatives, and run rounds of tests just to find out if it’s a good concept – before you get to the prototype stage. And if your concept isn’t hitting the KPIs you need, then you’ll likely need to cut your losses and go back to the drawing board. A core concept is not something that you can easily fix without reworking everything.
Which means you could be spending all of that time on a game which was never going to sell in the first place.
How the Concept Store works
It shortcuts all of the above problems by giving you a shop of concepts you can choose from. We whip up and sort the ideas in three different ways:
1. Either we test them
Using our tool, Marketability Testing, we’ve pulled apart and pushed around different concepts. So a chunk of the ideas on the concept store have passed this test and meet certain KPIs.
We do this by testing different video creative across a range of platforms, and then iterating on these until they’re great.
2. We take public data to score trends
We research the market by scanning new trends on both platforms, and then automatically give these trends a score. You can use these scores as a good indication to just how successful we reckon this concept will be, and how much work you can expect to put in.
3. Or our experts whip up new concepts
Although our testing and scoring is all based on data and trends, we don’t always want to fully rely on automation. Our in-house experts research the industry and brainstorm fresh, new ideas for you.
So every idea on the concept store has gone through a rigorous vetting process. And while we can’t make any promises, it means you’ve got a great starting point for your next title. Rather than blindly guessing and getting stuck on the first level of your game dev journey.
You can also sell ideas
We’re big on recycling. You may have a cool concept of your own, but it’s something you just don’t fancy working on (or don’t have the time). We’ve made it so you can sell any unwanted ideas on the concept store.
Or you can buddy up with other studio’s and share the workload. We’re making a community that not only encourages each other to do better (with a bit of healthy competition), but also to support each other.
Pick the ideas, and we’ll help you evolve them
Once you have a strong concept that ticks all of the boxes, you’re still in for rounds of iteration, testing its retention, prototyping, and more. In this sense, the concept store only answers so much. You still have a lot of ground to cover after phase one.
Publishing managers play a key role at this stage. They help you refine and develop an idea further, while planning next steps and coaching you through the process. Alongside them, Marketing Artists help supercharge and speed along your creatives, so there are no blockers stopping you from making the game.
They help keep things moving along at a good pace. Which is crucial in an ever-changing and fast-paced industry.
How to get started
At the moment, we’ve opened up our concept store to our Platform Partners and our Golden Cohort programme. You can register and get in touch with us here to learn more. We’d love to hear from you.
Once signed up, it’s completely free. And you can pick and choose as many concepts as you’d like.
